Triangle Relationship: A Review of Dynamic Capabilities, Strategic Foresight and Organizational Learning

The triangle relationship between dynamic capabilities, strategic foresight, and organizational learning

The bibliometric analysis clarifies that there is a close relationship between Dynamic Capabilities (DC), Strategic Foresight (SF), and Organizational Learning (OL). The author co-citation network maps (Figure 4-6), show that David J. Teece, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, and Sydney G. Winter, are the three primary authors that appear in all three areas. The OL-SF co-citation network (Figure 9), displays a group of researchers from the field of dynamic capabilities who connect closely to those in strategic foresight, including Riccardo Vecchiato, Jan O. Schwarz, Kee Van der Heijden, George Burt, and George S. Day.

However, there are still very few publications that can clarify the integration of OL and SF into the DC framework. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that integrates OL and SF into the DC framework. The proposed framework divides into two main stages, as follows.

Stage I: From environmental change to the memory of the future

Organizations need to face the challenges of environmental changes and should use strategic foresight to collectively build memories of the future as the evolution of human minds (Popper, 1978; Ingvar, 1985). Environmental changes can be divided into a business environment and a general environment that can cause environmental uncertainty (Vecchiato, 2015). The business environment involves the key factors that govern competitions such as competitors, customers, suppliers, new entrants, and the providers of substitute products (Vecchiato, 2015). The general environment consists of the factors that indirectly affect the business landscape, such as political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal, and ecological factors (Pulsiri and Vatananan-Thesenvitz, 2018b). Furthermore, the increasingly rapid changes of these factors in both the business environment and the general environment can cause more challenges for an organization to maintain in the market (Pulsiri and Vatananan-Thesenvitz, 2018b).

The occurrence of environmental changes results in the uncertainty. Many organizations fail to cope with uncertainty, which results in bankruptcy. Three main criteria cause failure in response to uncertainty, which is a high rate of change, ignorance, and inertia (Rohrbeck, 2010a). A high rate of change comes from key factors including shortening life-cycle, increasing changes of technologies and customer‟s demand, accelerating speed of innovation, and its diffusion Ignorance comes mainly from the inability of an organization to perceive radical changes. This inability generally arises from internal organizational structure, culture, and process that inhibit the perception of changes. Inertia is the inability to define a plan and implement actions for the response to changes Therefore, it requires top-management engagement and employees‟ collaboration to overcome the inertia. To summarize, environmental uncertainty makes it difficult for decision-makers to address the events or changes in their industry (Vecchiato, 2015, Rohrbeck, 2010b). Organizations that are sufficiently prepared for changes in their environments will perform better than the rest (Rohrbeck et al. 2015)

“Strategic foresight” can also enable the organization to get the views of the future and to gain more key resources. This approach involves the interpretation of signals, trends, and other drivers, and then communicate insights among colleagues to integrate them into the organization‟s operations (Pulsiri, 2020). The most crucial part of strategic foresight is to see and locate future sources of competitive advantage in order to acquire them (Pulsiri, 2020). This study defines the sources of competitive advantage as “the resources that the organization can use for value creationand pioneer the market changes which can result in higher profits, market sharesor financial gains” (Pulsiri and Vatananan-Thesenvitz, 2018b) Furthermore, the sources of competitive advantage must result in rendering the organization to be able to compete or outperform other players in the same market (Pulsiri and Vatananan-Thesenvitz, 2018b). Some of them can even allow the organization to create a new market. For example, the discovery of new technologies such as a platform-based ecosystem can create a paradigm shift that results in a new way of doing business. Moreover, a change in laws and regulations can allow some biotech firms to do research testing with stem cells in order to find the fountain of youth. Henceforth, a critical role of strategic foresight is to gain the sources of competitive advantage for further use in strategic planning (Pulsiri, 2020).

Ingvar (1985) mentioned that the primary role of SF is to allow the organization to build its memory of the future that can complement the memory of the past. Vecchiato (2015) explains the differences between the „memory of the future‟ and the „memory of the past‟ on an individual and organization level, according to the sources of information and building process. The memory of the future involves four stages of learning and knowledge creation process that consist of socialization, articulation, combination, and internalization (Vecchiato, 2015; Nonaka, 1994). As mentioned earlier (Figure 3), it is essential to utilize SF methods such as environmental scanning, scenario planning, roadmapping, and visioning (Popper, 2008), for a future-oriented knowledge creation process and then store the new insights inside an